Rune Labs — Organize to Analyze
Image Credit: ktsdesign, shutterstock
Our portfolio company Rune Labs announced a new round of funding today. I am delighted that digiTx Partners has joined Moment, TruVenturo, Loup Ventures and a great group of angels as an investor. Welcome David Kim to the team!
Rune Labs is our first digital healthcare investment in Moment II and one of two investments (my partner Clint Chao has written about the other here) broadly focused on issues of mental health. We are all about the Future of Work at Moment Ventures and our portfolio is quite diverse so I wanted to take this opportunity to not only celebrate our investment in Rune but also describe how it fits with our strategy.
Although we have been investing in The Future of Work since the inception of our firm, the trends powering this transition have accelerated due to the impact of Covid-19. Before the pandemic, the discussion was about technologies such as automation and AI in the context of certain industries, whereas now the question is about which segment of the economy won’t be transformed in the coming decades. We seek entrepreneurs with industry knowledge and imagination looking to lead these transformations. By addressing market failures or customer problems and delivering a transformational value proposition, we believe these companies can unlock huge value.
When we met Brian Pepin, founder and CEO of Rune we sensed that there was a fit with our approach at Moment. We spent the next two months figuring out what the company did and validating our initial instincts. The team is developing software to enable the development and delivery of the next wave of neuroscience therapeutics. Using Rune’s platform, researchers and physicians can analyze brain data for a single patient across time or many patients across research studies, treatment locations and academic centers. By enabling the use of data science technologies to analyze this data, Rune is transforming how researchers can use it, the same way Google changed how all of us develop insights — by making it dramatically easier to find organized information not volumes of data.
Neuromodulation devices are just the first of many sources of brain activity data that the platform is designed to work with — stay tuned to the Rune Labs blog to stay abreast of what’s coming next. Given the huge societal costs of brain-based conditions, the incentives to find better (or any in the case of some diseases) treatments is very high. It’s early days but the signs are promising that Rune managed data-sets and the insights generated from them will make a dramatic difference in many lives.
When we are diving into due diligence on an investment at Moment, there is always a point at which we ask ourselves, why this team for this opportunity? What experience, insights and skills do they bring that are unique? We have been able to find some amazing entrepreneurs tackling some gnarly problems and believe that in each case the problem/team fit is compelling. Rune is unique in that its work is in a hugely complex, very poorly understood, area and could potentially impact every person on the planet. We could not have undertaken this journey without a great founder to guide the company. Brian has a unique background that has given him the academic and professional experiences to tackle this challenge. That combined with his leadership talent and ability to inspire the key constituents that make a startup, colleagues, customers and investors, has been essential to Rune’s success and we are honored to work with him.
So how does Rune fit with the Future of Work? Instrumenting a thing — equipping it with measuring instruments — is a big part of our Masters of the Machines theme within the Future of Work. The idea that everything everywhere will be digitally connected is commonplace now. We believe the opportunity in this era of ubiquitous connectivity is the data created and the value that can be unlocked with that data. What bigger opportunity for instrumentation is there than the human brain? The brain is barely understood because observing its function is so difficult. It is incredibly complex and powerful, the coordinating center of all sensation and intellectual and nervous activity. Mastering that machine will lead to a new understanding of, and ability to interact with, the most important organ in our bodies. That will change how humans live, work and play and what could be more Future of Work than that?
